“... family tree which traced his descent back to Odin. But what he now regarded as the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, his contribution to the coming of God’s kingdom on earth, everyone else saw as the just punishment of a ...”

“... or in the ignominy of their difference’. The telling assimilation of class to species, or of a self-made man to a counterfeit coin, opens a window onto the unabashedly hierarchical worldview of feudal society at prayer. No less important than class was the great divide between clergy and laity, with monks and nuns (the ‘spiritual people’) enjoying the ...”

“... naked mole rats. Many sociologists see it differently, however. Backbenchers, they might say, are self-conscious in a way that mole rats are not; they are capable of explaining their own actions. But so what? asks Runciman. ‘The! Kung of the Kalahari are as aware as the professors and graduate students who study them of the function of meat-sharing in ...”

“... a therapy that suited his conception of the doctor’s role – to augment the patient’s natural self-healing. Indians, he declared, responded particularly well simply because they were closer to nature than Europeans. But his influence began to decline. The obvious reason was the rise of chemical anaesthetics; Winter implies that racial anxieties also ...”

“... too difficult for those who participated. Sometimes they collapsed into violent confusion and self-contradiction. But in the PAIGC and its companion movements in Angola and Mozambique lapses were exceptional. Those who persisted had to have driven themselves through formidable barriers of discouragement, insisting on disciplined tactics at the expense of ...”

“... who reported this rule having his leg pulled? Those rich thrusters of the Grande Epoque, the self-made men destined to become the new ruling class, come in for expert dissection in The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches by Mordaunt Crook, who is primarily concerned with their architectural tastes. Here we meet not only the men whose millions came from ...”

“... are strengthened and ‘weak’ currencies weakened: governments which try to stem these self-reinforcing tides are overwhelmed. The net effect, Michael Stewart suggests, is that the whole system is biased towards deflation. The national governments which decide whether to deflate or reflate do not – indeed, under our present political ...”

“... the General, a sort of 80th birthday present to himself, curiously crowns this long-term labour of self-fictionalisation. Ostensibly, it tells the story of his five visits to Panama between 1976 and 1981, at the invitation of General Omar Torrijos Herrera, ruler of the country since 1968. Torrijos must have thought very highly of Greene to invest in all those ...”

“... in the first place. And when he looks at government, dark glasses emphasise inefficiency and the self-seeking of interest groups. If the spectacles were swopped over, we might see an idealistic public sector doing its best – in the face of private-sector failures and special pleading – to improve welfare, the allocation of resources and the dynamism of ...”

“... clearly she could. When he writes ‘this far’, I am dead sure that ‘this’ is not an adverb. Self-contradictorily, however, he seems to believe that a word cannot be an adverb unless it ends in -ly. There seems no other reason for him to write ‘overly’, a North American usage I always find overly ripe. Stylistically, he is at his most infuriating ...”

“... some of Professor Mitchison’s material on shortage of food in Scotland in the 1690s. It is not a self-evidently absurd hypothesis that the wave of witchcraft prosecutions in Europe marks the Continent’s narrow avoidance of a major Malthusian crisis, and it seems to be true that witchcraft prosecutions accompany a rapid rise in population, and that cases ...”

“... there should be rising coal production: there is no more reason why a country should aim to be self-sufficient in the production of energy than in the production of steel, cars or tiddlywinks. A country should concentrate on producing the goods and services in which it has a comparative advantage, selling these abroad in exchange for the products in which ...”

“... all cases it starts slowly. It takes a literary turn, ensuring that its perpetrators have a lot of self-consciousness to get out of their systems before they go on to discover, if they ever do, that, like any other form of poetry, humour taps a deep instinct. But since for just that reason the comedian must go to school, and since the Cambridge Footlights has ...”

“... a man of commanding height, a middle-class barrister like Menzies, a skilled debater, supremely self-confident, a platform speaker who could rouse even an Australian audience. He became Labor leader in 1967 and Prime Minister in 1972. Here, at last, was the larger-than-life figure who could give the Australian Labor Party the image of sophistication and ...”

“... gives us to understand that Prince Charles is an expert on the subject, as he probably needs be in self-defence; it is to be hoped that he has supplemented these studies by meditation on the appropriate bits of Blackstone. Mercifully, however, royal personages are dependent on books for only a small part of their education. That the Queen ‘hardly reads at ...”